Follow Friday – Night by night, troops photograph Arlington graves

When my husband heard the story on NPR this morning about soldiers photographing more than 219,000 graves in Arlington Cemetery with iPhones, he knew I would find it fascinating. He knew because he has spent countless hours following me around countless numbers of cemeteries while I photograph hundreds of headstones and document GPS coordinates for FindAGrave and BillionGraves.

Photographing headstones is a passion of mine — especially in Louisiana where subsidence and hurricanes can mean that a headstone might not be there in the future. Documenting the information on a headstone could very well help someone find clues to their past — and they can’t do that if the information from the headstone hasn’t been documented.

The Arlington Project

Rick Shulman writes on the msnbc.com PhotoBlog, “The sometimes eerie task to photograph more than 219,000 grave markers and the front of more than 43,000 sets of cremated remains in the columbarium is part of the Army’s effort to account for every grave and to update and fully digitize the cemetery’s maps. The Old Guard performs its work at night to escape the summer heat and to avoid interrupting funerals.“

Comments

I’ve never heard of this but it sounds worthwhile. In La. the weather alone will erase the past, be it a grave or a place.
Usind Ged as an example: the post office was wiped from the land by Rita, the Ged lake is gone…a lake a mile long is gone! What chance would a headstone or grave have.